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Reading: Until the Real Thing Comes Along by Elizabeth
Berg, in one night and a teeny part of a morning.
I love how she writes, like she's talking to you.
The end made me cry, and cry, and cry some more, but in a good way.
Watching: Circus, but only three scenes of it. (Go on, you can figure out why.) I'm fairly certain the rest of the movie is crap, so I haven't bothered with it yet. Purchasing: A vacuum cleaner. I have been trying to get by with a battery-powered Black & Decker that my mother bought for me because the commercial showed it sucking up cat litter, and a Dirt Devil with a triangular swively head that Mary left me when she moved, and neither one of them is doing the trick, so I bought a real one, an actual Hoover. I'm kind of excited about it. Listening: To the people outside playing volleyball. Is it bad that it annoys me that they're shouting in another language? There are a lot of Indian people living in this complex for one reason or another, and a bunch of them are out there playing volleyball and it's kind of bothering me that I can't understand what they're saying. Is that wrong? Laughing: On Friday I was standing in line to buy my BLT from this deli in the food court in the office building next door. "Born Again" was playing on the Muzak, and I swear to you, this guy standing behind me who had to be at least 6'4" and looked like he walked in off a construction site started humming along with it. I honestly had to put my hand over my mouth (in a subtle way, of course) to keep from giggling at him. Drinking: Cinnamon Hazelnut coffee out of my X-Files mug, and Contemplating: How little I care that tonight is a new episode. I thought things would get better when Mulder got back, but we still don't know anything about the origin of the baby and she's so obviously going to give birth in the season finale and then we'll have to wait all summer to know anything about the damn baby (which, by the way, gestated for like a year and a half) and I hope Chris Carter isn't actually expecting anyone to care by next season. I don't care now. And I'm sad about this.
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The sidebar was written Saturday evening, except for the coffee part. Now it's Sunday morning, and I spent the rest of my evening goofing around online while watching the writer/producer commentary on Circus, then watching the writer/producer commentary on Dead Again, then going back to Circus at midnight as a result of an IM from my fellow Eddie freak (hi, do you want a pseudonym? Let me know), with whom I spent the next, oh, three hours chatting. (To our credit, we did talk about non-Eddie-related things, such as work trauma and bridesmaid dress trauma, for part of those three hours.) I should introduce you to my fellow Eddie freak, actually. I would have mentioned her long before now, but I've been trying not to talk about this obsession too much, lest I start to sound like a broken record and you all start to hate me. See, once upon a time I accidentally bought two copies of the same concert, Unrepeatable, on Ebay. I put a little thing in the journal offering it free of charge to anyone who wanted it, 'cause I'm nice like that. Then Meredith wrote and said Hey, I have this friend who is all over Eddie just like you, she'd probably be interested, here's her e-mail address and I'll give her yours. So we started writing, at first polite little messages about how we know Meredith (both through journaling) and where she works and where I work, blah blah blah. Then we both get Glorious at about the same time, so we have to talk about that. Then she gets Definite Article for me to pay me back for Unrepeatable. At some point I get the CD version of Glorious (they're different, okay?) and send that to her, and she sends it back with a tape of Eddie on Whose Line, and I send that back with tour programs, and on and on, not to mention the daily e-mail with Eddie quotes in the subject line. All I'm saying is that I am very glad to know her, but not just because she's right there with me on the Izzard thing, but because she's right there with me as a single thirty-ish woman with angst about things like relationships and work and bridesmaid dresses, and so we are friends separate and apart from the bloke who wears make-up, and I'm happy and thankful about that. (Frankly, you should be glad I know her too, because if I didn't have someone with which to blather on daily about this admittedly late-in-life celebrity worship, I would have had to do it here, and it probably would have been months before I noticed that my readership had declined to maybe two other people who are Eddie freaks too.)
 So, continuing the theme of this entry (which is friendship, friendship, okay? Not Eddie, I promise) I must tell you that the issues with my local friends continue. At the moment, Tara and Gillian are in a fight about something very, very stupid. Apparently they had this snit on the phone last Sunday night. As soon as they hung up, Tara called me to vent about it. Five minutes later, Gillian beeped in, and I didn't answer it. Two minutes later she beeped in again, and I clicked over and told her I was on the phone. When I called her back, she immediately asked in a slightly accusatory tone if I was on the phone with Tara, because she had tried to call Tara back and got a busy signal so she assumed that she had called me to vent, which she had, but I lied and said I was talking to somebody else. And then Gillian vented for the next twenty minutes. And I did with her what I had done with Tara, which is listen and occasionally mutter false affirmations of understanding and swear over and over to myself that I will Not. Get. Involved. See, negotiating the peace agreement has always been my role in the past, and it is, believe me, a thankless one. When you try to get two people who are mad at each other to not be mad at each other, they each first get annoyed with you because when you suggest a way to work it out, it will seem to them like you're on the other person's side. Then when it starts to feel like you might be right, they're just annoyed that you're sticking your nose in something that has nothing to do with you, even thought they're the ones who dragged you into it in the first place. So I started to understand that I would just have to listen, but not do anything. And I thought I would be okay with that, but I'm not. It takes just as much energy to not get involved. For example, Tara had a bad day on Friday, and called me at work asking me to please come over, even though I really just wanted to go home to bed and even though Gillian had called earlier in the day offering to do something if I felt like it. So I went over, we got good food and bad movies and just vegged, and it was nice. But I can't tell Gillian about it, because she would either be upset that I chose to do something with Tara or be upset that we didn't invite her, even though she and Tara have this thing between them at the moment. So now I'm starting to understand that I might have to gently but firmly back out of even the sounding-board role. I am tired of walking this fine line, with these two in particular, but Mary occasionally enters the fray as well. She and Gillian both often vent to me about Tara and her financial situation, because Tara still gets help from her parents, and I have started to shut this down as soon as it starts because (a) I got help from my parents until just about five months ago and (b) it is none of Gillian's or Mary's or anyone's business what Tara's financial relationship with her parents is. And when Mary was going through boyfriend trauma, that was pretty much all she could talk about, and Gillian and Tara vented to me about being sick of hearing about it. Well, guess what. I am sick of hearing it all.
I have been feeling dissatisfied with my friendships here for quite a while, and have talked about it in here before. And I understand that it's because I know for a fact that a circle of friendship does not have to be this difficult. It does not have to be difficult at all. It is entirely possible that four -- even five -- girlfriends can mesh perfectly, each individually with the other and as a whole. They can be easygoing enough to have very few problems in the first place, and they can be mature enough to handle those random but inevitable differences easily and amiably, without hurt feelings and without taking sides and without the endless venting. I'm blessed to be a part of it, but it has made me less tolerant of the situation here. I am far less willing to put up with all this bullshit than I was before. Before I knew how easy it could be. Before I knew that there didn't have to be bullshit in the first place. It's just hard. It's hard to step out of the roles that have enveloped you for so long, something Melissa and I have discussed at length. No one around you wants to accept the changes you're trying to make. You must be who you've always been, dammit, we're depending on you to listen to us. These girls here will undoubtedly be hurt and/or offended when I tell them that I cannot, will not listen to it anymore. They will try to make me feel guilty, and they will probably succeed to a certain extent. But the only way I can strengthen my resolve is to put it to use. And this is where it's going to start.
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